MMORPG

I've actually been really enjoying it. My wife and I have been playing almost daily since the beta opened, and we've been having lots of fun.

So that said, I have some pretty serious concerns with the game. It boils down to this: it may as well be a singleplayer game.

There is no trading system, besides a very limited (4 items/day or something iirc?) afterthought of a "gift" system. So no player economy whatsoever, which is personally my favorite part of an mmo.

Nearly all actions can be done alone, too. The only exception I can think of is chopping down high-level trees. You also get a nebulous "bonus" for fishing near another player, but I couldn't even tell you what it does.

Besides that, the only difference between this and a fully single player game is seeing other players running around on the map, and having a chat box.

So I'm really torn, because as an MMO, it's honestly terrible in its current state. However, as a free game to hang out virtually with your friends, it's actually pretty great. After work, I'll go into a Discord voice chat, boot up Palia, and just go fishing for a while.

Overall though, I say give it a shot. Plus, if it's successful, I'm sure more player interaction stuff will be added later on to make it even better.

I've only spent 30-ish hours yet, but from my perspective:

It's cute, a solid beta, but not quite "there" yet.

It aims to be a third person Harvest Moon style game, which focuses on peaceful building of your farm, growing both your homestead, relationships and sense of community. Adding a dash of adventure and world story to keep you hooked.

All the parts for this are in place, but the MMO part means everything is real timed, and during the 8 real-time hours it takes for your house to get an expansion, you need some other entertainment.

The world is pretty, but there's not enough to it (yet) to go exploring for explorings sake. Mainstory progress is slow, as each step is gated behind skill progression, and skill progression is basically 8 variants of grinding.

There's little to no quests helping with your grinding, and grinding goes faster than the timers require, so you're kind of stuck grinding out of boredom.

And if you, like me, find yourself grinding for materials you expect to need in the next tier, you also end up exploring all of the world ahead of time, and discover the exploration rewards as a distraction from your grinding.

Meaning rather than being delighted, you get annoyed by having your inventory filled with random quest/relationship items you haven't got a use for yet, as well as being deprived the exploration rewards when the story later urges you to explore.

Tl;dr: It could be cool, the core mechanics are solid, we'll have to see if the writing, pacing and narration can bring it home to a complete game.